Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The girl in the center is Eri, a girl from a seaside area of Japan with oddball parents who do wrong at every turn, but this has little affect on her psyche OR her interest in art in anime or comic fashion.

All her life, she has had dreams of becoming a famous sketch artist, and despite a bad uncle who keeps stealing money from her, Eri still manages to make it through a semester at a prestigious art school before deciding to drop out and just sketch full-time.

Publishing houses, magazines and the like turn her down until she enters a run-down annex of a major publication and finds a rag-tag crew of rather intriguing employees and lands a job as a cartoonist for the 'skin' or soft-core porn mag they produce.

A young man working there hardly fits the type of character who would photograph, much less write articles for such a rag, but Koizumi Kotaro as Hirabayashi Masamune is that guy, and his main reason for working there is because the photographer is his hero.

See, there is this well-known photograph of foreign children posing for the camera when a bomb explodes behind them, and the image garnered the photographer an award - so why, then, is he working at the smut magazine chasing young girls up & down the street to get them to pose for the dirty read?

This is a comedic endeavor with plenty of laugh-riot moments as well as an interesting storyline that kept me rooting for Eriko to the very end.

The subtitles were good, but I never got nor liked having to read the Popeye-type lingo, which I'm assuming was meant to be written in the form of some Japanese 'hick' dialect of sorts?

Eriko struggled to maintain her job, her dignity, and even her virtue while clinging to her dream of becoming a well-known sketch artist, and in the end, ... well, I'll let you find out on your own.